EMC has shed some light on its foray into the server flash market, under a strategy called Project Lightning.
Speaking at the 2011 EMC World Conference, in Las Vegas, EMC information infrastructure products president and COO Pat Gelsinger revealed: “EMC will be entering the server flash business. Server flash is moving server to storage for accelerated performance and making it part of our automated tiering capabilities. Project Lightning will allow us to take flash and put it in the server.”
Gelsinger explained: “Today, we have compute clusters over here and storage arrays over there. The question would be: 'Can I do something to get the compute closer to the storage, and the storage closer to the data?'”
He said the future lies in getting the two closer together, “and to do it flexibly across my cloud operating environment, my virtualisation environment, to easily move these things around so I get the right data next to the right compute capabilities in all cases”.
Gelsinger added: “We're going to extend the vast technologies out to the server cache capabilities of Lightning as well. And then, additionally, we will allow distributed caching across those environments.
“So we'll be able to flexibly manage those flash resources whether they're storage-side or server-side, just the way a customer's application would want to do.”
He said Lightning is a PCI express-based server-side card. “There's a niche of applications that don't require interface and relationship with shared storage. That's specifically how we're going to differentiate Lightning.”
Project Lightning will be delivered later this year.
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